Omar Traboulsi outlines the challenges faced by rural women’s cooperatives in the Republic of Lebanon and introduces an initiative that supports the crucial role they play in the country’s economic life.

***

In Lebanon, grassroots agricultural producers are organizing within the framework of cooperatives. The key to cooperative work is to come together and pool resources – including agricultural production equipment and other inputs, but also knowledge and negotiating skills – in order to get members a better deal.

There are currently around 1,350 registered cooperatives in the country. In general, farmers’ cooperatives tend to be dominated by men, but agro-processing cooperatives tend to have a female membership. There are around 125 rural women’s cooperatives involved in agro-processing, most of them located in the Beqaa, South, and North administrative regions. The agro-processing that they are engaged in involves transforming raw agricultural produce into desirable products for the market, including many popular foods. The cooperative set-up helps the members to secure a place to produce their wares, and obtain equipment and raw materials, as well as helping them get into local and other markets.

Challenges

Both male-dominated cooperatives and rural women’s cooperatives face significant difficulties in accessing local and international markets. Key problems include decades of neglect of the agricultural sector of the economy, especially the lack of enabling policies for investment, particularly in the cooperative sector. The national budget allocation for the agricultural sector rarely exceeds 2%. Another problem is the poor state of infrastructure, especially roads and irrigation canals, which reduces the chances of producing a good harvest and of getting crops to market while fresh.

A further issue is poor protection from risk. Agricultural workers and farmers typically lack access to safety nets, including insurance against crop failures and social security. Like everyone in Lebanon, farmers and agricultural producers are working against a backdrop of unrest – both political and economic. Conflict and economic downturns make it really hard to cope with damage to buildings, land and resources, interruptions in production, collapse of local markets, and so on.

Until very recently, the Ministry of Agriculture offered little support and accompaniment to rural cooperatives. At the widest level, political will is needed to challenge unfavourable national, regional, and global policies which allow unregulated market access for foreign goods, creating unfair competition, thus undermining local produce. Closer to the ground, many rural cooperatives face difficulties in meeting various legal and administrative requirements, as well as in keeping up with participatory and inclusive internal governance processes.

Whilst the above mentioned obstacles may seem to affect men and women equally, they have a more dramatic impact on women who, in addition, suffer from other gender-specific obstacles.

All these challenges pile up on top of each other, making agriculture precarious, stressful, and unrewarding. The result is a growing trend amongst male cooperative members to abandon agriculture, at least as a main source of income, and to rely on non-farming activities and jobs. Women have fewer options as a rule, but where they can also find more profitable activities, they too are voting with their feet.

What do cooperatives need to stop the rot? They are crying out for the right support and investment. Lebanon’s farmers and agro-processors need optimistic, energetic leadership from the government, recognition of the crucial role they play in the country’s economic life, and support to help the agricultural sector grow and prosper. But if this leadership is to enable Lebanon’s women cooperative members to play the fullest role they are capable of, it needs to understand the particular issues which shape women’s lives in agriculture.

Gendered differences

In Lebanon, rural women have had to become the main contributors to agricultural production, from planting to marketing, due both to extensive male migration to urban areas and to increasing widowhood as a result of war.

The development of rural women’s cooperatives is believed to have started in the mid-1990s, shortly after Lebanon’s 15-year-long civil war ended. As international post-war reconstruction money poured in, a significant amount of aid was channelled to establish income-generating structures for women. Some 50 rural women cooperatives were set up and benefited from interventions that included the provision of hardware, as well as training, mostly focusing on technical production and accounting.

However, such initiatives, although involving high capital investment, were oblivious to some critical factors determining success or failure. By early 2000, it became obvious that the focus on women’s co-operatives was largely ill-planned and would be short-lived. Despite rural women’s traditional know-how and the importance of their income in securing sustainable livelihoods, rural women’s cooperatives face several problems.

Foremost among these is that even though they produce good-quality products, resulting from expert skills and knowledge, market access for rural women’s cooperatives remains a huge problem.

One explanation for this is women’s limited mobility. Women members of rural cooperatives report that even though they are the producers and provide all the labour in their small agro-processing businesses, restrictive social norms are such that they are not able to travel on their own and use public transport. As a result, they are not able to explore markets, meet and negotiate with clients and suppliers, or deliver and/or buy merchandise.

In addition, women need support to develop and acquire formal business skills. Rural women have had less chance of receiving the education and training that would give them the knowledge and technical skills they need to compete on a level footing with commercial interests. Despite some rural women already having an amazing amount of natural ability and formidable levels of skills, it is true to say that women in the rural areas lack experience of independently organizing and running business operations, of handling significant sums of money, of undertaking financial transactions, and of establishing direct relations with relevant public institutions. The predominance of, mostly male, “middlemen” further complicates women’s market access, enables men to cream off the profits from women’s work, and reinforces the domination of existing markets by men.

Further problems arise from the enormous workload that women shoulder each day before they can turn to agricultural work. Rural women’s unpaid, unaccounted, and invisible care work and care burden – which has to happen somehow, come what may – results in exhaustion and a lack of sleep and leisure.

Engendering market access

In 2002, the Collective for Research and Training on Development-Action launched a national intervention with rural women’s cooperatives focusing on some 40 active cooperatives distributed primarily in the Beqaa region. The membership of these cooperatives includes more than 600 women, most of who are either heads of households or contribute significantly to household income.

The initiative combines qualitative research, direct support to women organizing in rural women cooperatives, and policy dialogue with decision-makers. Building on previous gaps, efforts were made to promote women’s knowledge and leadership, as well as access to the public and political sphere. The initiative assumes that a transformation is necessary in the gender relations within households, so as to enable women to engage in fruitful economic activities and be active in the public sphere. On-going research seeks to identify the impact of rural women’s cooperatives in supporting the emergence of rural women’s leadership as well as the new possibilities created for sustainable solidarity marketing. A key research focus is also the impact and importance of the added value of the work of rural women’s cooperatives, namely the wise and rational use of natural resources to promote sustainable lives and livelihoods.

Policy dialogue has been scaled up through full engagement with a national committee, newly established by the Ministry of Agriculture, with the aim of developing a national strategy in support of cooperatives, one aspect of which is sustainable market access, especially for rural women with a focus on their rational use of natural resources.

The late Nobel Prize laureate, Dr. Wangari Maathai, said, “You must not deal only with the symptoms. You have to get to the root causes by promoting environmental rehabilitation and empowering people to do things for themselves. What is done for the people without involving them cannot be sustained.”

■

● Omar Traboulsi is the programme manager of the Collective for Research and Training on Development-Action (CRTD-A), a non-governmental organization based in Beirut, the Republic of Lebanon. The CRTD-A seeks to contribute to the social development of local communities and organizations through enhancing capacities particularly in gender analysis, gender and development, poverty and exclusion.